Presentation
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Assessing the effect of bilingualism on the left frontal cortex connectivity in the CIMAQ cohort.
Poster A12 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Tanya Dash1, Sylvie Belleville1,2, Michael Ewers3, Ana Ines Ansaldo1,2; 1CRIUGM, 2University of Montreal, 3Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research (ISD) Klinikum der Universität München
Over the years, studies have shown that bilingualism provides an advantage in cognitive performance, more so in aging individuals. By frequently practicing the language control mechanism, bilinguals tend to be faster and more accurate in tasks of attention, working memory, and cognitive control. The bilingual advantage is also evident in the structural and functional differences in the regions related to bilingual language control. The aim of the current study is to examine the effect of multilingualism on the resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) for the left frontal cortex (LFC) as a region of interest. Thus, explore the role of bilingualism in building cognitive reserve through the higher LFC connectivity. These bilingualism-related connectivity differences may help build a cognitive reserve that eventually renders the bilingual brain more resistant to age-related cognitive decline. We computed rsFC for the LFC seed and performed seed-based connectivity and graph analysis while comparing group differences for the monolingual and multilingual participants with age, diagnosis, and gender as covariables. Seed-based connectivity results show higher strength of functional connectivity between LFC, and right planum temporale and central opercular cortex for the multilingual group compared to the monolingual group. These regions are part of the primary auditory cortex and are also related to stimulus-driven auditory attention and phonological processing. For the graph analysis, the multilingual group showed greater local efficiency than the monolingual group at the cost of 0.45. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find global connectivity differences between the groups. The present results suggest that lifelong juggling with two or more languages may impact the brain at a network level, in this case, LFC connectivity. In the future, however, decomposing cognition and measures of bilingualism into its elementary constituents may allow an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms by which bilingualism may contribute to cognitive and neural advantages.
Topic Areas: Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes